Having to go back to the basic nav option, smallest alloys and non-electric seats felt a bit of a retrograde step but the Audi made up for it with its wonderful ride and with things which you couldn't get on the BMW: 4wd, DSG gearbox, adaptive air suspension. The engine was an absolute peach - it may have been a diesel but it's still one of the nicest I've lived with; though it did give a typical diesel shudder when the stop-start kicked in.
The gearbox was something I didn't really care much for at first. It's not that nice at low speed manoeuvring - my drive is a particular annoyance because it has high hedges either side and is steep just as you enter it. Reversing out slowly is particularly hard to judge as it slips the clutch quite a bit. But the gearchange the rest of the time is just lovely: so quick and, in auto mode, so intuitively programmed. Having lived with the auto BMW first, I'd now be tempted to choose the 272PS Allroad over the BiTDI version with 320PS (which has the ZF 8-sp box) purely for the 7-sp DSG transmission.
Sadly I never tried the launch control in the Allroad. It would have been pretty brutal; it's got absolutely loads of torque and is pretty quick. I think they tend to make 300PS or so when rolling roaded in reality. It certainly made going quickly easy, and I did quite a lot of that with 40-mile 6.00am A-road trips from my fiancee's house back to mine for a few months early in 2017. Which is one of the reasons I went 5,000 miles over the contract mileage; the other is that it was actually quite fun to drive, as a trip to the Elan Valley last year proved.
I would have quite liked to keep it but the price I was offered (£27,500 or so I think) was too high when I need the money for house renovations, and looking at the prices of approved used cars with higher spec. I'd be tempted by another in future but it would need to have lots of options and a better colour scheme. However, even the upgraded media system is pretty old-hat already and that's becoming quite an important part of the way cars feel to live with, so perhaps not.
So, fast, practical, economical, fun to drive, capable of some light off-roading on green lanes (just once), not as spacious inside as you might expect and with an MMI controller which seems deliberately to work the opposite way to BMW and Merc, I'd recommend them wholeheartedly. Not exactly characterful but then what is these days? While I won't miss the regular pig urine top-ups (three times in 21k miles/2yrs), I don't think there's anything particularly negative to say about it. I'll probably look back and realise I miss it immensely.
